Westworld Season 2: Thoughts About This Mess

Of all the things I can’t handle in my TV shows, inevitability might be on top of the list. I can’t spend every episode of a series waiting for the most obvious thing to happen.

Take Westworld for an example. The moment Dolores killed the fly at the end of episode one made it obvious the hosts were going to realize they are hosts, and the odds were pretty good that we’d meet a host who didn’t know it was a robot. Such inevitability made it hard for me to take any joy in the show’s first season.

Enough people raved about it that I gave the show a quick re-watch, and I can see how people love it. I wouldn’t say I hate watch it the way I did The Leftovers, but I can’t say it’ll ever be a show I adore.

Here are my thoughts after three episodes of season two.

I’m okay with shifting timelines, but I need some kind of cue to tell me where we’re at. Putting a young Robert into the real-world scene in episode two helped, but I’d prefer to get the cue at the beginning so it’s easier to understand. Lost did this perfectly with the sound effect that signaled a transition to the flashbacks. Awake used warm and cold color treatments to tell viewers which reality its main character was experiencing. Westworld should do something similar. The timelines are too tight—weeks or days instead of years—for the characters to age, and the locations are exactly the same. They don’t have to throw a time card up on the screen, but some clear indication would be nice.

What was the main allure of season one? Watching the hosts become aware. Dolores figured it out. Maeve figured it out. Clementine could not handle, went zombie. Even Teddy, who rivals Revenge’s Daniel as one of the dumbest TV characters ever, figured it out. Now what? Aware Dolores is in a way even more of a drone than unaware Dolores. Her character has one focus that eliminates any depth she might have had. Wouldn’t it have been better if seeing what happened to her dad made her long for the simpler days when he was healthy and they were all happy? There’s an “ignorance is bliss” conflict there that could have put her character under a microscope by forcing her to question her new and murderous purpose. They passed and made her a military leader instead. Yawn.

It’s hard to be invested in the hosts’ fight against Delos when we only know three human Delos characters—Sizemore, Charlotte and Stubbs. The show hasn’t given any of them the time we need to have any sort of investment in their fate. We wanted Jon Snow to win the battle of the bastards because we love him and Ramsay was thoroughly detestable. Westworld hasn’t made us love the hosts or hate the humans, so I can’t care for the outcome of the conflict driving the story of its second season.

Where was William last week? More importantly, will that character even work now that we know he and the Gunslinger are the same? Yes, I think it will.

The show really suffers without Robert. They never made him a full-blown evil genius, but he was the central figure for every storyline to revolve around. Season one could ground storylines for the humans and the hosts in Robert. Without him, everything feels like it’s floating in the same space without anything to tie it all together. Maybe that’s the point…the park was under control with Robert and without him it spins out of control. He one-upped the board’s attempt to push him out of his creation in the most epic way possible: Writing a narrative that involved his own death to prove Westworld can’t exist without him.

I’m calling BS on the hosts making any sort of stand against the Delos security team. There’s no way old west shotguns could stand up to the weaponry Delos threw at them.

I like the idea of more parks with different themes. But at some point it’s going to be like okay, there’s no way one company can have enough money to do all this.

Why can’t they just give all the hosts clean hard drives? Wouldn’t that solve everything?